Playing around with Augmented Reality

PI stumbled across a Facebook page -ICT with Mr P - and have been avidly checking out all his suggestions for iPad use in class. He is an ICT Lead teacher without class responsibility in a school in the midlands, and his ideas are inspired.  The one I intend to use immediately with my class is the app Colarmix, which allows coloured-in pictures to come to life.  My own children (age 6 & 9) and I had a play around with it at home with amazing results! 

This bird design can be done without having to do any in-app purchases. It would be brilliant for creative descriptive writing, which I'm planning to do after Easter. 

Ben's shoe design made me think of the Year 6 SATs writing paper from a couple of years ago where children had to write about a brand new training shoe.  We actually had to download the app onto our own personal iPads at home and then make an in-app purchase of £1.99 to unlock the content to go with these pictures but it is well worth it.  There are a couple of little glitches with it: Charlie (age 6) coloured over the QR code on his first attempt, and then the second time he tried a bird and coloured the bird and the background the same colour which didn't work. We're going to try again tomorrow so fingers crossed... 

I've also been trying to get some Augmented Reality apps to work, with limited success so far, but I'm determined that the iPads will be able to add another dimension to my lessons, as well as being a useful tool for keeping children occupied in guided sessions. 

Mrs Allen's Introduction

We've had 4 iPads in the class since January, using them daily in Guided Maths and Grammar, spelling and punctuation (GASP) sessions. During the first term they were used mostly to explore and try out new games, and to ensure that all children were able to use them.  There was the obvious use of Google for research, and by half term in February we had extended the usage to include the Google Drive, allowing children to add to and share their documents in a central area. This has been very successful so far, with each child typing up their own Indian myth ready for publication, and several children creating spreadsheets and presentations at home for others to add to. 

During Term 4 the children have been evaluating the apps they have been using in the Guided sessions, for 2 reasons.  Firstly, to categorise the apps by popularity and ability, order that they can be used more purposefully next term, and secondly in order to feedback a selection of tried and tested apps for the rest of the school to use.  

Our most popular apps for maths were: 

Splash Maths Grades 4 & 5, Math Vs Undead, Champions Lite, Geometry Pad, AUM Multiply, Coop Fractions, Mental Math, Penguin Math, Jelly Math Quiz, 9x9 training and AB Maths. 

The top English apps, used during our GASP (Grammar, spelling and punctuation) sessions were: Synonyms Quiz, English test, Grammar and Spell Game. 

I've added quite a few more over Easter so this should keep them plenty occupied as a holding activity when they are working independently.